


And although I was burning, you're the only light

by LadyNighteyes



Category: Radiant Historia
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Siblings, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-29
Updated: 2018-01-29
Packaged: 2019-03-10 21:45:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13510383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyNighteyes/pseuds/LadyNighteyes
Summary: Heiss doesn’t blame the children. They might not understand now, but they will once they’re older. Once they’ve seen what the world is really like.He calls them Stocke and Vervain, after flowers.





	And although I was burning, you're the only light

**Author's Note:**

> I got [an ask](http://downtroddendeity.tumblr.com/post/170249948782/hey-so-ive-read-a-bunch-of-your-ideas-and) on Tumblr for what would happen if Heiss took both siblings away with him. I was originally was going to reply with a big long meta post.
> 
> Then it got out of hand.
> 
> So, morskijez00, thank you for the plotbunny. It found a good home. And the usual thanks to Quicksilver and Keltena for reading over this before I posted it.

Granorg is in chaos. The supporters of Queen-Consort Protea claim she is next in line to the throne by right of marriage; those of Duke Lorecs say the crown should only be held by one of royal blood. Various other cousins claim their connection to the royal line is closer than his, and two have already miraculously discovered that a grandparent was secretly the child of a prince on the wrong side of the sheets. Lorecs claims Protea had the entire family kidnapped or assassinated to clear her way to the throne; Protea’s spokesmen claim the entire situation was set up to frame her. Every noble in the country who’s been coveting a neighbor’s vineyards has decided now would be a good time to saunter in and claim them, and the Valkyrie of Alistel, with characteristic efficiency, moved an army through the Sand Fortress in the first week and captured the entire eastern side of Gran Plain and the farmland to the north. It’s doubtless only a matter of time before Cygnus joins in.

Heiss doesn’t care. The lot of them deserve each other.

He doesn’t blame the children. They might not understand now, but they will once they’re older. Once they’ve seen what the world is really like.

He calls them Stocke and Vervain, after flowers.

He gives Ernst a desire to join the military. The boy’s always been handy with a sword, and it should work well enough as a starting point for his training. Eruca, though… well, she’s only twelve. That planning can wait.

Heiss leaves himself in their memories. They come to him when they arrive in the city- war orphans, going to family for safety. There’s enough of that these days to go unremarked. Ernst takes longer than Heiss expected to sign on with the army, but then, putting thoughts in someone’s head is never a precise art. He sends all his pay home to Eruca, and comes to see her whenever he can get away. Heiss has her enrolled in schooling; Alistel is a scholar’s haven, so she’ll be taught as well here as she would by the royal tutors back home. They misrepresent history with hogwash about the glory of Noah, of course, but he can set that straight for her himself. They would have spoon-fed her something equally asinine about family duty and the nobility of sacrifice in Granorg, anyway.

She prays to the Prophet for her brother’s safety every night, to Heiss’s amused exasperation. He’s explained to her enough times that Noah is (or, more accurately, _was_ ) just a senile old man- one of these days it ought to sink in.

In retrospect, the first warning sign was the way Eruca’s face went confused and distant sometimes when she was talking to him, as she cut off in the middle of whatever she’d been saying with a frown and went quiet. He hadn’t thought much of it; she’d always been a shy child. But then comes the day when Ernst comes home on leave, and over dinner she says, very quietly, eyes fixed on her plate, “Uncle Heiss, you hadn’t talked to Father in ten years before he died, right?”

“That’s right,” he says.

“Then how did you know I knew how to write with my left hand?” she says. “You mentioned it last week, but they taught me not to when I was little.”

Damn. He must not have been thinking. Victor’s irritation about it had stuck in his mind, even all these years later. “Stocke must have mentioned it in one of his letters,” Heiss says offhandedly.

“No,” Ernst says, “I didn’t. She-” He pauses, and for a moment, that same blank, distant look crosses his face. Then he shakes his head, and seems to come back to himself. “She was embarrassed,” he says. “She asked me not to tell anyone who didn’t already know.”

“And that isn’t all,” Eruca says. “Before that, you asked me-”

He’s proud of her, honestly, he thinks, even as he feels the timeline starting to spiral out of his control. She must have been planning this for months. She lists his slips, mistakes going back to the day they’d arrived in Alistel, her voice getting steadily more confident as she goes. “I’m very grateful to you for taking me in,” she says with twelve-year-old earnestness and princessly politeness, “but please, who are you really?”

It’ll take more than a quick trip back to fix this.

Ah well. Perhaps not their uncle, then. At least it will be easier to help their careers along without having to worry about interfering busybodies crying about nepotism.

Heiss sets them outside the city with just enough money to establish themselves, steps back, and waits.

Ernst doesn’t join the army.

He works odd jobs, any he can find, and comes home late every day with dirt ground into his clothes. There are no tutors for Eruca on a day-laborer's earnings, and she spends her days with the neighbors, doing menial tasks for pocket change.

_(“No, you silly girl,” Nana said, taking the pot out of Vervain’s hands. She was from the flat downstairs, old enough to remember the founding of Alistel, and if she had another name than ‘Nana,’ neither Vervain nor Stocke had ever heard it. “You wash the cups and silver first. Put a filthy pan like that in, and you’ll have to fetch all clean water afterward to wash all the rest. Didn’t your mother ever teach you how to wash dishes?”_

_“She died just after I was born,” Vervain said. One of these days, she vowed, she’d manage to put a meal on the table without needing to ask Nana to rescue her because she burned something again._

_“Well,_ that’s _no excuse,” said Nana, and Vervain giggled, then felt guilty for it. "I wish I could give your father a piece of my mind. I don't care how rich you lot were, it's disgraceful to leave your children not knowing how to take care of themselves."_

It's not so bad as that, _Vervain wanted to say, but she knew it was a lie.)_

An obvious mistake- of course the boy won’t sign on if it means leaving Eruca alone in Alistel with no one to look after her- but a tricky one to fix. It takes weeks of combing through other timelines to find someone suitable, longer still to orchestrate events for Ernst to meet them without his army posting to help, and each time they talk the delay grates on Heiss more. Finally, impatience gets the better of him, and he has the children's landlord raise the rent past what they can afford.

It works like a charm: they go straight to the only place they can. It's not long before Ernst finally agrees to leave Eruca in the custody of the empty-nester parents of a junior doctor working in Alistel Castle.

_(“Stocke, I’m begging you. Don’t do this,” Sonja said. Despite the show she’d made of pouring the tea, all she had done with hers so far was hold the cup tight._

_“I’ll be fine, Sonja,” Stocke said. “Everyone over in Granorg is too busy fighting each other to bother with us. I won’t be in much danger.”_

_“You’d be in less if you stayed here.”_

_“And do what? Spend the next twenty years hauling freight and mucking animal pens? Fighting is the only thing I’m good at that pays, and we both know your parents are undercharging me. We can't keep leaning on their charity forever.”_

_“Stocke, you’re a_ healer _. I’ve seen you do it. I’m sure if I put in a good word for you, they’d hire you on as a medical assistant.”_

_“I’m not cut out to be a doctor, Sonja. I can’t look someone in the eye and tell them I can’t save them.”_

_“But you think you can let someone die on a battlefield?" Sonja snapped._

_“Yes," he said. "I'm sorry, Sonja, but you're not talking me out of this. Even if I die, Vervain still gets enough money to live on out of the widows and orphans fund. If it goes well, we'll be able to give your parents as much as they deserve, and still have some left over to get Vervain back in school. It's the best option I have right now."_

_"You think_ money _will make it all better for Vervain if you die?!"_

_"No," he said wearily. "But it will give her a chance to choose her life. That's better than nothing."_

_Sonja stood up abruptly. “Don’t you dare not come back, Stocke,” she said. “Don’t you dare leave your sister without a brother.”_

_Then she walked out, leaving him alone with the cold, untouched tea.)_

Heiss suggests to Hugo that they push further into Granorg, and Ernst sees half a dozen major engagements before his first year of service is out. After that, it’s easy enough to get him transferred to Specint.

_(“You’d be protecting this nation,” the old man with the hooked nose said, staring intently into Stocke’s eyes. “Oh, the army will tell you that’s what they’re doing, but you must know by now that that’s all just propaganda. We annex a few cornfields until some baron who fancies himself a prince hires enough mercenaries to take them back, and then call it a glorious victory when the mercenaries get a better offer and we rout a rabble of conscripted peasants with sticks. We could retreat all the way back to the Sand Fortress and it wouldn’t make a whit of difference to the people in this city as long as the food kept coming in.”_

_“Sir,” Stocke said. It was the safest response._

_“Now, now, my boy, there’s no need to be so formal!” said the old man, laughing jovially. “We don’t stand by that sort of thing much in Special Intelligence.”_

_Stocke said nothing, keeping his face neutral._

_“No, the armies aren’t a threat to this nation nowadays,” the old man said. “But just last week, one of my men stopped a plot to overload one of the mana distributors near Spruce Avenue. If it had gone off as the saboteurs had planned, it would have detonated and destroyed the entire area.” He smiled. “Your sister lives there, doesn’t she? With that older couple. The Gauntlet researcher’s family.”_

_It might have been a threat. Of course, it might just be ordinary manipulation.)_

_(“The pay’s better and I’ll be home more often,” he said, but Vervain knew her brother well enough to tell when he was hiding something from her.)_

Of course, that leaves the problem of Eruca. He arranges a scholarship, first- he can’t have her entirely uneducated. A job as a runner at the castle before and after her classes happens almost without his involvement; Ernst’s pay isn’t so high and the doctor’s family isn’t so well-off that a little extra doesn’t help.

A mind he’s altered as much as hers won’t let him in again once it heals from the initial changes, so there will be no phantom desire to join the army this time. How best to handle the next step…

_(“Ah, Vervain. I am your brother’s commanding officer. My name is Heiss. I have a proposal for you, if you are willing to hear it.” He was a short, well-dressed, balding older man, not at all what she had pictured her brother’s commander looking like. Not that Stocke talked about his work much._

_“A… proposal?” She had assumed there was some errand he needed run._

_“Yes,” he said, steepling his fingers. “I believe there may be a traitor among the command staff here in the castle, and I would like your help locating them.”_

_“Sir, are you sure you have the right person?” she said. “All I do is-”_

_“Run errands for every mid-level bureaucrat in the east wing,” Heiss interrupted. “You, my dear girl, can go nearly anywhere in the castle without anyone remarking on it. Including those who would recognize my more… conventional operatives.”_

_“And,” he added, leaning back, “I thought you would appreciate the opportunity for… restitution against the ones responsible for your brother’s little near-miss last month.”_

_Vervain looked up, sharply._

_“I lost three agents on that mission,” Heiss said. “He was the only one who made it out alive, and I’m sure you have some idea of the state he returned in.”_

_She thought for a moment. Then she said, “What do you need me to do?”)_

Heiss doesn’t notice anything strange when Ernst stalks into his office, until the boy picks him up bodily and slams him into the wall.

“I’ll kill for you,” Ernst says, quietly, the blade of a knife pressed against his uncle’s throat. “I’ll steal, and lie, and torture, and stand by while you do worse, if that’s what it takes to protect the people of Alistel. But if you try to drag my sister into this, I _will_ bring you down.”

Heiss smiles. The boy’s gotten a bit overconfident. A quick, complicated movement, and the knife is skittering across the floorboards.

“Really, Stocke,” Heiss says, straightening his cravat, “you ought to know better than to use that hold on the person who taught it to you.”

To his credit, Ernst already has another knife out, though Heiss can tell he’s favoring the side where a Gauntleted elbow caught him.

“I don’t know what nefarious plan you think I have for your sister, but-”

“Don’t bother, Heiss,” Ernst says. “I got the whole story from her yesterday.”

“I can’t imagine what you mean,” Heiss says, trying to keep a grin off his face.

“Find your patsy somewhere else,” Ernst says. “If you so much as _look_ at my sister again, I’ll find something that will end you. And then I’ll make sure the world knows it.”

After Ernst is gone, Heiss fishes out the dagger that slid away under his desk, and turns it over and over in his hands. Then he calls his secretary in.

“I’ll be seeing Vervain in my office again in two days,” he says.

He’d hate to think he’s taught his nephew to make empty threats.

When, a few months later, the Valkyrie arrives in the city unannounced with an army and a polite but firm request to be admitted to the Prophet’s presence, Heiss laughs in unabashed delight.

Yes, Ernst _is_ coming along well, he thinks as he goes back. Now, what to do about Eruca…

_(Vervain wandered over curiously, to where the crowd of soldiers was gathered at one end of the courtyard._

_“Hey, you there! Curly-haired girl in the blue dress!” said a soldier cheerily. They never did find out who it was, afterward; whoever it was had kept their visor down. “You want a go?”_

_“At what?” she asked, surprised. She wouldn’t have thought it would be easy to spot her from the center of the crowd._

_“The army seized a shipment of guns from Granorg, and the eggheads down in R &D have been studying them,” one of the other soldiers said. “You know how they say it’s only nobles who can make them work? Turns out it’s actually just mana capacity. This guy here brought out a little one they weren’t using and we’ve been taking potshots at that training dummy at the end of the yard there.”_

_“I left scorch marks!” piped up another._

_“Yeah, on the wall beside it. No wonder the sergeant doesn’t let you have a crossbow.”_

_“Private Sorrel from 4_ _th_ _squadron knocked it over. I’ve got a gold piece on someone beating her record by the end of the day.”_

_The first soldier hadn’t moved at all. She remembered that, afterward. “Want a go?” the soldier said again._

_“Um… all right,” she said, and the soldier handed her the gun, grip-first._

_It felt… right in her hand, somehow. Familiar, as if she’d dreamed all this before. Mechanically, half in a trance, she flipped the chamber open and checked the ammunition type._

_“So to fire it, you have to-” a bystander began, and Vervain turned and put four shots into the dummy until there was nothing left but a smoldering pile of straw.)_

If there’s one thing Heiss has learned about Alistel in the years he's been sabotaging their military research to prolong the war, it’s that if you give them a new weapon, you can always trust them to make the most of it.

 _(“She’s_ fifteen _!” Stocke snarled. “At least wait until she reaches recruitment age!”_

_Vervain didn’t let herself shrink in her seat, though she wanted to. Her brother scared her when he was angry, and he was angrier now than she had seen him in a long time._

_“The Prophet himself has issued a special exception for her, Sergeant,” said the officer coolly._

_“I’ve seen the battlefields in Granorg. What good will those guns you’re so proud of do you if the only person who can wield them is dead?”_

_“I won’t need to be anywhere near the fighting, Stocke,” Vervain said. “The engineers say they think they can make me a gun with a range of over a mile. They’ll be stationing me on the battlements of fortresses, not on the ground.”_

_“So you can be the highest-priority strategic target for every would-be assassin for thirty miles?” he snapped._

_“Sergeant!” said the officer, warningly._

_“Are you really willing to send her out there just to have a glorified ballista until someone gets their own sniper close enough to shoot her down? Do you really want to be the one to have to tell the Prophet-”_

_“Stocke,” Vervain said, putting her hand on his arm, “this isn’t your decision.” She touched the amulet for Noah’s protection at her neck, looked the officer in the eyes, and said, “What must I do?”)_

“Ah, Stocke,” Heiss says. “There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”

“Just get to the mission,” Ernst growls, and he looks- well, Heiss has watched him die too many times for it to be anything like the worst he’s ever seen the boy, but it’s a remarkably good showing considering he’s uninjured.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Heiss says. “Colonel Ashton came to visit me yesterday. Something about giving you a warning about insubordination.”

Ernst says nothing, but the hand resting on the hilt of his sword tightens, just a little.

“I had a word with him instead,” Heiss says, and smiles. “I believe he came around to my way of thinking.”

It’s not the first officer he’s made into a Shadow, and it won’t be the last.

“And that is?” Ernst says, voice cold.

“I suggested that perhaps the safety of the new asset could be better assured if she was accompanied by someone of a somewhat… broader skill set than the regular army was prepared to provide. I offered the services of one of my most promising agents for the task.”

Even Heiss has trouble reading his nephew’s face these days, but this time, Ernst can’t hide the dawning, disbelieving hope in his eyes. It’s been a long, long time since Heiss last saw that expression, and he finds himself smiling wider.

“I’ve already handled the paperwork. If you accept, you’ll be transferred from Specint to a special posting alongside your sister, starting immediately.”

“You’d really just let me leave?” Ernst says, and Heiss is surprised how incredulous he sounds.

“Of course,” Heiss says. “Unless there’s another agent you’d trust with the job?”

“No,” Ernst says. There’s a long, long pause, and then he says, his voice uncharacteristically choked, “Thank you, Heiss. And I’m sorry. I misjudged you.”

Heiss laughed. “Oh, it was nothing so noble as you’re thinking. I couldn’t have your work suffering because you were preoccupied with worry over your sister.”

“Nevertheless,” Ernst says. “Thank you.” And he smiles, the first real smile Heiss has seen from him in years.

_(The charms of the bracelet slipped through Vervain’s fingers, round and round. It was supposed to be a meditation aid: a prayer for self at the first, a prayer for family at the second, a prayer for friends, a prayer for the suffering, a prayer for the defenders, and so on. It was supposed to remind you of everyone under the Prophet’s protection. The problem was, she found herself thinking of her brother for all of them._

_“Relax,” Rosch said. “Stocke will be fine. I’ve seen him bounce back from a lot worse than a crossbow bolt.”_

_“I know, it’s just…”_

_“Yeah. I know.”_

_…for the faithful, that they might bring enlightenment to the world; for the faithless, that they might accept it…_

_"The Prophet Noah personally sent us here," she said. "That means whatever happens, it must be for the best, right?"_

_Rosch shrugged. "Maybe. I'm no theologian. But Alistel is still standing, so he's at least got a seventy year winning streak."_

_...For the living, for the dead- she hesitated on that one._

_Next thing she knew, Rosch's hand was on her shoulder, shaking her. "Hey, come back to us, Vervain."_

_She blinked, then shook her head. "Ah- I'm sorry. I must have drifted off."_

_Rosch nodded. "Stocke gets like that too, sometimes. Guess it must run in the family."_

_What bead had she been on? She couldn't quite remember, for some reason. Well, might as well start back at the beginning. For herself, for her family...)_

_(Stocke lay on his stomach in the underbrush, watching the movement down in the valley through the rifle scope. The two of them had realized a few months back that he could use it nearly as well as Vervain. In the early days, she probably would have insisted they tell their superiors about it; now, they just flipped a coin whenever they were alone in the field._

_That was happening more and more, these days._

_A sniper on the roof of a fortress could be worked around, and was. A sniper who could be anywhere was another matter entirely._

_"The patrol's past. We're clear," Vervain, crouched beside him with a pair of binoculars, whispered._

_"Got it," he said, not looking up._

_Stocke gave it another five minutes, to give them plenty of time to get out of earshot, watching the soldiers milling around through the scope._

_Then, carefully, he began feeding magic into the gun, magic that sank into the runes carved into the silver and glass of the chambered bullet. When he could feel it glowing with power, resisting when he tried to add more, he squeezed the trigger._

_You couldn't look up from the scope until you saw the shot hit. Vervain, exasperated, had had to explain that to the arms researchers back home. The mechanism forced all the stored mana out of the bullet at once, and though the spells carved inside the barrel propelled it too fast for the mind to steer directly, it would dissipate before it hit if the shooter lost concentration. It needed to know where to go._

_That especially held on a cloudy day like this. It didn't seem foggy until you were sighting on a bank of cannons from a mile and a half away._

_He saw the light of the explosion a moment before he heard it. A big enough flash that it must have caught the cannons to either side of the one he hit, but not enough to have destroyed the whole bank. He'd been hoping to set off a chain reaction, but it seemed that however the old thaumatech worked, it was less volatile than the modern Alistellian models._

_"The patrol?" he said softly, entirely still._

_"Running towards the camp," Vervain reported, equally softly._

_"I didn't get them all. Give me two more shots."_

_"Hurry," she said. "These are Dias's men. They won't be in disarray long."_

_He nodded, though he knew she couldn't see it, and, with agonizing care, sighted a little to the north, up the row of hulking cannon shapes, gray with the haze of distance. "Hurry" was a relative word in this job._

_The second shot took out another three or four, and he felt the ache of fatigue from rapid magic depletion starting to settle in. Another careful adjustment, and this time he could see the dark shapes of soldiers scattering away from his target. Another slow unspooling of magic, and he was gasping through gritted teeth as he pulled the trigger._

_They waited a few moments after the third explosion before Stocke slowly inched back behind a nearby boulder. After three shots, the enemy would be trying to guess where they came from; best not to give them a telltale flash of movement to give them a hint. Through the fog of sudden exhaustion, he began disassembling the rifle, though the barrel was almost too hot to touch, even with gloves._

_Vervain, silently, handed him a flask of bitter tea, and he drained it without a word. The two of them went through a lot of it. It helped, a little._

_By the time a search party of infantrymen attendant on Her Majesty's Court Knights checked the spot half an hour later, there was no sign that two Alistellians had been there at all.)_

"Ah, Stocke, Vervain. I'm glad I caught the two of you before you left."

"Heiss?" Ernst says, turning.

"It's been a long time," Heiss says. "How is your new posting treating you?"

"Well enough," Ernst says, shrugging, then turns to Eruca. "Vervain, this is Heiss, head of the Special Intelligence division."

She actually curtsies, and Heiss has to suppress a smile. Ernst's manners all but evaporated in the first week, but Eruca's, it seems, have survived all these years. "It's a pleasure to meet you, sir," she says.

"Was there something you needed to tell us, Heiss?" Ernst says. "Something we need to know about our next mission?"

"My, my. In quite a hurry to be done with your leave, aren't you?" Heiss says, chuckling. "No, I wouldn't dream of claiming to know anything about the top secret assignments of a soldier not under my command."

Eruca frowns; Ernst snorts a laugh.

"No," Heiss says, "I simply wished to congratulate you. My men in Granorg report that the two of you are becoming something of a legend at the front. Controlling the rumors about you has certainly made _my_ job more interesting."

In fact, he's already had to crush a few, during a period when most of their targets had been aligned with Protea's faction. They were entirely too close to the truth.

"And," he adds, as if as an afterthought, "I wanted to give you this."

It's probably the last time he'll ever hold the White Chronicle, he thinks as he holds it out.

Well, they gave it to him to try to convince him to die.

Good riddance.

"A... book?" says Eruca, taking it.

"It's blank," Ernst says, leaning over her shoulder as she flips through pages that, to Heiss's eyes, are lined with gold-edged text. "What is this, Heiss?"

"Just... a gift," Heiss says, smiling. "Think of it as a lucky charm."

"You've never relied on luck in your life, Heiss," Ernst says, with an easy, friendly insolence Heiss hasn't seen for years. "What is it really?"

"It's called the White Chronicle," Heiss says. "I'm sure one or the other of you will find some use for it." Or both, perhaps; who knows? "It can't hurt, can it?"

"I- I suppose not-" she still hasn't quite lost that slight stutter when she's surprised, either- "But... why?"

Heiss spreads his hands. "Indulge an old man's sentimentality toward the best student he ever lost."

"Maybe your other students would learn more if you ever bothered to answer questions," Ernst says dryly.

"In my line of work?" Heiss says. "I'd be dead in a week."

"Stocke," Eruca says, in warning tones, and then to Heiss, "I promise I'll hold onto it."

"You sure we can afford to be hiking overland with a book that size, Vervain?" asks Ernst.

"It's lighter than it looks. It won't be a problem." She turns back to Heiss again. "Thank you, sir. Whatever your reasons."

"That's my girl," Heiss says, grinning wolfishly. "I look forward to seeing what the two of you accomplish from now on."

"Be seeing you, Heiss," Ernst says, and Eruca waves goodbye over her shoulder as they walk away.

Heiss walks back to his office, whistling, to sabotage the most dangerous mission his niece and nephew have ever been sent on.


End file.
